158 réponses à ce sujet

[ShinsFortress]

Yes, yes, yes, that all sounds very logical.  When I am planning stuff at work.  This is a video game, and I prefer healing to more planning.

 

"HP management", hrumph, no thanks.  I get one more whiff that we're playing Bioware Excel then I'm out.

[PsychoticFox]

I'm not a "I Want An Insurmountable Challenge" strategy gamer either, however, to provide some challenge to the "game" is what makes it a video game. I remember my first time playing Origins I had to play on easy, and then I got better at the game and I had to up the difficulty to prevent combat from being a cake walk. Even in Super Mario Bros. there had to be an element of challenge and things to figure out otherwise the game just plays itself. That is why a lot of games nowadays have different difficulty setting so that they can modify the game to your particular preference of difficulty. I find it unlikely that you won't find a setting for DA:I that isn't to your liking.

 

See, I don't mind if combat is a "cakewalk". I'm playing for the story, especially on second/third/fourth/etc playthroughs. Getting DA:O on PC granted me access to the "killallhostiles" command which is absolutely wonderful after 20 console playthroughs in which I had to kill every enemy over and over. It got very repetitive and annoying. As for challenge - give me puzzles, hard decisions, etc. Not a necessity to micromanage.

 

 

Just to be clear, I believe Guild Wars 2 not having a dedicated healing class may or may not have something to do with the decision for no dedicated healers. Honestly I think this is a gameplay aspect that could really work. Not having to focus so much on healing give the player a unique opportunity to focus more on dealing and reducing damage. I think this means that HP management is something that we will have to keep much more of an eye on, and personally like that outlook for games. Also I should add that it looks like you can dodge and block so you should be able to avoid a lot of damage if you are doing that.

 

I don't know about not having a dedicated healer. My primary toon in SWTOR is a healer and I rather enjoy my role in combat. I may not deal much damage, but I work. I can reduce damage with my set of skills and I can heal when that power gets damaged out before cooldown. It's really my ideal role - everybody gets a damage-absorbing bubble and I heal as needed. It's a lot less stressful than being the tank and having to work around multiple power cooldowns and timing with interrupts just right so that the whole party doesn't get blasted.

[UniformGreyColor]

Alright... Well to both of you, you concerns are valid and I don't expect dedicated healers to disappear entirely for video games any time soon -way too many people would be really ticked off if that happened. It is apparent that some RPG franchises are making a transition in how the player goes about staying alive in games -like it or not. Now I know this sounds cliche and kind of simplistic logic, but you haven't even given it a chance yet. Reality is we don't know how the new system is going to work regarding healing or staying alive. Think about it this way ShinsFortress, instead of casting one Healing spell every 10 seconds, you have to cast 2 spells every 15 seconds on your tank to largely negate the damage done to him, I highly doubt this is out of the realm of possibility. I've even heard that there is a certain passive ability in the game that reduces some or all incoming damage by 50%... thats a lot, especially for a tank. Damage negation can loosely be interpreted as the same way a healing spell would work. That's also uncertain at this point, but at the same time I don't think BW would totally do away with a way to create abilities that would add longevity to a fight one way or another; DA is just not that hard core. Giving a way to allow the party to increase the time before a party member is completely out of the picture is not something DA is going to have at this point in the series. Also I find it highly unlikely that BW is totally doing away with console comands; it looks like you will still be able to 'killallhostlles' with a few keystrokes as unapealing as that sounds to me. And when the Keep is up and running, we will be able to make decisions to our hearts content.

[zqrahll]

It all sounds terrible to me-- I'll be playing on super easy to avoid as much awful health potion management BS as possible.

[sky_captain]

This will all depend on how well it's implemented and balanced, could be cool and force me out of my standard 2 mage, one to heal one to kill mind set that I've developed over the last 10ish years. Could also play like complete **** as well, only one was to see.

[Silith]

Personally, I find the idea of magical instantaneous "healing" from ANY source to be an absurd game conceit that I'd like to see get dumped as much as possible--not because it's "unrealistic" but because it's stupidly unbalanced.  The difference between "I have limited resources and must use them wisely" characters and "I'll just spam a spell or chug a potion and instantly be fixed" is so spectacularly huge that they're basically impossible to "balance" for or around.  It leads to gameplay decisions where you're literally NOT ALLOWED to develop your defense or offense to the point that you can make healing superfluous.  Then either EVERYONE has access to roughly equivalent heals or your non-healers become utterly dependent on the healers and helpless without them.
 

 

I agree with this.
I enjoy playing a healer but I can see how a game could benefit if you removed this concept. Because if you allow a mage to specialise in healing, you have to balance your game around that. If you balance your game around it, it means that the player is expected to have a specialized healer in the party. I found that I either played as a healer myself, or I HAD to take Wynne (DA:O*) or Anders (DA2) along. It restricted my party composition and I don't like that. I want to take along whoever I want, not having one party member forced on me regardless of how I want to play.

 

*I know that you can specialize Morrigan to be your healer, but I've always found that immersion breaking - it makes no sense to not have Wynne being the healing mage.

 

I'm wondering about the ingame reason, too, though. I can't see how it could be explained beyond "lol no healing magic". Maybe the Fade Tear disturbed the connection to the Fade in such a way that you can't heal anymore. Would make storytelling more interesting, too, IMHO - with healing magic all around, I never really saw the risk of being a warrior if you can heal through anything anyway.

 

For all those worrying that the combat will be too hard without healing - I fully expect that you can play the game on easy and have no problems whatsoever. That's why there are difficulty settings in the first place, so that everyone can play as they like.

[Gtdef]

Did you find any challenge at all with DA:O?

 

Hmm, I pretty much failed the first playthrough because I thought I had to use combos like shatter, crowd control etc, and didn't bother much with gear because traditionally in the d20 ruleset games the best gear tends to be craftable. So I build the party in a way that wasn't very effective. Got many aoe control spells like paralysis and the frost line, stealth and stuns for my main character etc. 

 

What happened was that the fights dragged for long, and I went Redcliffe first where I had a hard time beating the swarm of skeletons, so I thought I did something wrong. I ended up ditching the run and tried something more aggressive. Switched my class to warrior, spec'ed Morrigan into fireball.

 

The first Nightmare run was ****** easy though. I was constantly checking to make sure that I actually switched the difficulty.

[N7 Spectre525]

Seems like Bioware going "Hardcore" is going to ****** off quite a few players who play for the story and not grueling combat.

I dont understand this company.

They come out with a good game,decide to make it a franchise and then with every new game in the series they change loads of things from the previous games. This has been done with both Dragon Age and Mass Effect.

With every other game franchise I've gotten into usually the titles have the same gameplay consistency albeit with a few graphical and minor gameplay tweaks. Most of these titles double Biowares sales and I think it may have to do with consistency of the gameplay.

If you pick up Assassins creed 1,2,3 you know what your getting but with Bioware its always a "what did they remove now" kind of thing.

I dont know...maybe I dont know what Im talking about but I cant help but think if they kept a distinct but consistent gameplay design Bioware would reach those lofty sales goals that they are looking for. 

[Sidney]

The goal for the lack of healing spells was -- according to the devs -- that trash mob fights become relevant. So far, every trash mob fight was so far pretty meaningless, you could go all out and never care much, because you went out of the fight with full power again.

Now, they want to change that.

 

If they do it right, I approve of this chance, because it increases the tension and the importance of the decision whether I really need to kill every trash mob group.

However, if they do it wrong, they will give players the chance to still regain all health after combat through some "trick" or administrative effort. In that case, their goal would not be met, but I'd get the feeling of just having to do another chore. That would be very, very, very bad.

 

Anything that adds to the overhead of the game doesn't help increase tension. It becomes twiddling about. BG had this and I wasn't all that tense about fights because of the non-recovery.

 

Obviously as you said if mana is unlimited and there are healing spells then they will have done nothing expect make you standaround during cool down. If there is not a potion limit then people will just craft and spam potions. What this does is at higher levels, ala BG2 or DAO, when you have a crap ton of potions you do not care and thus are not tense. At lower levels it will make the long slogs into dungeons take longer which isn't tense, it is dull.

[wolfhowwl]

I am sure that the game will ship with a "story" difficulty and I doubt Normal will be particularly challenging anyways.

[Super Shamois]

I don't understand why people are complaining about this.

 

For those that don't like a challenging combat, it is easily solved by turning the difficulty down. Bioware always includes a low difficulty that is laughably easy. I'll admit that I once used the lowest difficulty in DAO because I had played the combat encounters so much that I just wanted to RP a new character without micromanaging the combat.

 

For those who don't like the mechanic itself..... turning the difficulty down already alleviates this. It sounds like the mechanic is directly related to difficulty level; on lower difficulty levels, it may not even apply at all. Problem solved.

 

All of the difficulty questions invoked by this mechanic are easily circumvented by managing the difficulty setting of the game. That is what it is for, after all.

 

Now, people who are concerned that the mechanic might compromise the gameplay by adding layers of tedium instead of challenge or strategy to higher difficulty levels I understand. I just don't see a reason to complain about it, as we've no idea how poorly/well it is implemented.

[Sidney]

I don't understand why people are complaining about this.

 

For those that don't like a challenging combat, it is easily solved by turning the difficulty down. Bioware always includes a low difficulty that is laughably easy. I'll admit that I once used the lowest difficulty in DAO because I had played the combat encounters so much that I just wanted to RP a new character without micromanaging the combat.

 

 

OK, let's be clear. This isn't about not wanting tough fights. The fights we have are not tough. DAO is a joke of a tactical system and you can auto-attack you way to victory. DA2 oddly requires more effort because of the paratroopers but that is neither here nor there. I would trade all the lousy trash mobby fights in the deep roads for a handful of violent and actually dangerous encounters instead of the XP pinata fights we got.

 

If the fight is not tough then I do not want the recovery to be tough. Instead of creating interesting fights that requires us to actually use tactics and might per chance be dangerous in individual encounters the apparent response is to make them "tough" in the collective by aggregating damage across encounters. This is really the opposite of wanting tough fights this is about having a long, long series of easy fights that gradually whittle you down and the way you overcome that is by doing X to heal. That X part isn't interesting.

 

There are tactical systems that encourage you to avoid damage. The old Jagged Alliance games or XCOM games penalized you for being wounded and you could do things (actual tactical things) to minimize your risk of being wounded. The DA systems aren't built that way. Fights are swarms of something jumping all over you. There is no cover, no real use of elevation, no ability to use any formation and so forth so in trash mob fights you get dinged (BG1/2 had the same combat "style") up almost inevitably.

[Super Shamois]

It is about having difficult fights to some people. A lot of the complaints I've heard (not just here) are relegated to little more than "it will make it too hard".

 

For the most part, I think your assessment is well-reasoned. It's not altogether out of the realm of possibility that this mechanic will turn combat into simply a less-direct JRPG grind, replacing level-ups with micromanagement and backtracking. Voicing concerns is obviously understandable, I have a few myself. I just don't understand why there are so many knee-jerk reactions to this is all, especially regarding challenge level.

[UniformGreyColor]

BTW, it looks like trash mobs are still trash mobs in this game based on what i've seen in a video.

[BroBear Berbil]

The goal for the lack of healing spells was -- according to the devs -- that trash mob fights become relevant. So far, every trash mob fight was so far pretty meaningless, you could go all out and never care much, because you went out of the fight with full power again.

Now, they want to change that.

 

If they do it right, I approve of this chance, because it increases the tension and the importance of the decision whether I really need to kill every trash mob group.

However, if they do it wrong, they will give players the chance to still regain all health after combat through some "trick" or administrative effort. In that case, their goal would not be met, but I'd get the feeling of just having to do another chore. That would be very, very, very bad.

 

Weird that trash mobs would be their reasoning, as healing in DA:O and DA2 shined on boss fights. Trash can always be locked down with CC; you can't do that with a boss.

 

This is pretty disappointing for me since my healer/blood mage was easily my favorite character to play in Origins, but it's in line with DA2's anti-healing mentality. Being able to play a character who primarily healed, outside of an MMO was one of the things that got me hooked on this series. That, and bards. I'm a support player at heart having played healers, bards, and enchanters in different MMOs. Can't say I'm too thrilled about the apparent lack of healing, but if there's at least some active buffing it might soften the blow.

[Bayonet Hipshot]

Multiplayer. 

 

Notice the combat is becoming very ME3 MP-like. We have health bars like the ones in ME3, the health regeneration outside combat seems to work like in ME3, we have a revive mechanic like in ME3 (though how warriors and rogues can revive followers is simply beyond me), We have more abilities focused on sheer DPS with very few support ones, etc. 

 

I will not be surprised to see a medigel equivalent in DA:I, maybe it will be called Mythal's Favor like it was in DA 2. 

 

For those who say: "oh no, DA 2 limited healing as well." No. It offered options for Hawke to be a healer. It has a actual Creation school tree which for some reason, is nonexistent in DA:I, all we have see is Fire, Ice, Entropy + Shock, Spirit. 

 

So IMO, this is due to multiplayer and this due to Bioware's design choice of wanting the game to be more action oriented. 

[Gtdef]

I'm going to go into rant territory but I have good intentions

 

I wouldn't put much stock in any reasoning Bioware gives for the combat system design. They are never consistent with the mechanics. They use responsive and fast interchangeably. Tactical means either spell combos or kiting.

 

I don't think that the developers ever tried to push the boundaries of their combat system (which is understandable since it changes every time...). They design all encounters with some ability combos in mind and that's it. Everything else is just filler, and it shows. And boss fights are damage sponges. This is true for both DAO and DA2, although DA2 had more interesting fights overall.

 

Take DA2 Warrior for example. They based all their marketing campaign on Mighty Blow, added the most stereotypical warrior abilities from any game that uses the concept -cleave and charge- as extra skills, and then everything else is just damage and defense modifiers. How can they even design tactical fights when the game lacks abilities that enable it. They can instead add a "Rally" skill that buffs the damage output of the party (like the one existing already without the tree synergy fuss), a "Banner" one that increases the defense of the party and there you have it, Warrior just became more interesting while ditching 5 talents trees.

 

DAI sounds like a repeat. And now that they said that "enemies respond to our tactics" I guess that it will even be more streamlined. Actually every time that I hear something like this, I picture my father trying to cook and being happy that he didn't completely destroy the food. I could be wrong, but looking back at a largely unimpressive and confined combat system, I doubt that this will be the case.

 

What I'd like to see is abilities with customized shapes, all the damage modifier effects to either go away or change to something more interesting, like for example Reaver's health percentage passive instead of increasing damage done, to reduce ability cooldowns and stamina cost. I want to see crowd control abilities that go beyond stuns and slows and instead be something original, like for example changing the terrain and the physics completely like a plane shift, adding illusions that work against both ourselves and our enemies and we have to play a different way to get more of that skill.

 

I want to see the rest of the party becoming useful, like for example calling on rogues to use "arrow storm" attacks, and mages as artillery to use target ground aoe bombardment. Destructible environment that can be used as a trap, for example lure enemies in a building, use a stun attack and bring the building on their heads. The engine has destructible environment, I think they can do something like that.

 

I'd prefer even a glimpse of something like this to a vast 150 hour game that you essentially do the same thing over and over, making people instead of enjoying both aspects, story and gameplay, to want to focus in only one. 

[AutumnWitch]

yea I agree this might take a lot of fun out of the game. (For me anyway)

[Muspade]

I shall adapt to this change, as I adapted to DA:O and DA2, even though DA:O was ****** easy if you had taunt + forcefield.

DA2...harder. I can't wait to see if this will be challenging or frustating.

[Realmzmaster]

Multiplayer. 

 

Notice the combat is becoming very ME3 MP-like. We have health bars like the ones in ME3, the health regeneration outside combat seems to work like in ME3, we have a revive mechanic like in ME3 (though how warriors and rogues can revive followers is simply beyond me), We have more abilities focused on sheer DPS with very few support ones, etc. 

 

I will not be surprised to see a medigel equivalent in DA:I, maybe it will be called Mythal's Favor like it was in DA 2. 

 

For those who say: "oh no, DA 2 limited healing as well." No. It offered options for Hawke to be a healer. It has a actual Creation school tree which for some reason, is nonexistent in DA:I, all we have see is Fire, Ice, Entropy + Shock, Spirit. 

 

So IMO, this is due to multiplayer and this due to Bioware's design choice of wanting the game to be more action oriented. 

 

It is not due to multiplayer. The points you talk about in your post were in most if not all of the early crpg games especially those built on the D & D 2.0 rule set. All of the points you speak of can be found in the Gold Box games, Wizardry, Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Might & Magic, Ultima, Temple of Elemental Evil (each companion had access to a first aid ability) and other early crpgs which had no multiplayer.

 

PS. Temple of Elemental Evil and some of the early crpgs were turn-based.

[NoForgiveness]

So I really really really like the idea of no or limited health regen. It's a nice change from every other game in existence. I don't think I'm going to like limited health potions/no heals things. For one, wow taught me that I'm healer. Any game that has that party tank/dps/healer thing in it makes me feel the urge to play that role. Two, I don't want to be running back to camp every five seconds because I'm out of health potions. That just sounds terrible, and if it forces me to do that I'll end up selling the game. I mean, dark souls is the only game I really know of that does this kind of stuff right now and your pretty well loaded with lifegems so there isn't a need to run back to camp just to refill health stuff(there are other reasons). So if this game can't at least counter the need to be running back and forth then, it's gonna suck ass and I'm gonna sell it for the pile of **** it is. That said I am still really optimistic about this and lvl scaling(my other big worry).

[VileIntent]

Ok, I have dug through the 3 pages and still not a single person has mentioned Bloodmages Is this specilization being removed due to no healing? If it is in the game how will a Bloodmage heal? Like before stealing from party members? I believe there is an item or game mechanic they just haven't let in about yet to make up for the removal of the out of combat health regen.
If Bloodmage has been removed I for one will be very summed out. I have a Anders awakening as a bloodmage / spirit healer with over 1,000 health. I find his healing and buffing to be very powerful and extremely fun to play. Awakening has a lot of great +attribute and con mage gear.
I do not have a single play through on any game where I do not use blood magic. The lack of Info about this specilization has me very nervous it did not make it into DAI. Which I find very hard to believe as it was a core storyline component in Da2. Thoughts?

[wolfhowwl]

The blood magic specialization is gone.

 

BioWare felt that the work to integrate it properly into the game story-wise was not worth the investment.

[Sylvius the Mad]

The automatically regenerating health was one of the worst parts of DAO. It was part of BioWare's explicit focus on tactical play over strategic play, and it was a terrible idea.

I am overjoyed that they are undoing that decision.

[Icy Magebane]

The automatically regenerating health was one of the worst parts of DAO. It was part of BioWare's explicit focus on tactical play over strategic play, and it was a terrible idea.

I am overjoyed that they are undoing that decision.

I don't think it would have mattered much in DA:O since we had a ton of healing spells and mana regenerated.  All that health regeneration did in that game was save us a few seconds so we didn't have to cast "heal" after every combat.